A New & Better Approach to In-Person Events

A few weeks ago, I complained that most in-person tech events suck. It's so hard to meet new people and explore opportunities.

The post attracted 15K+ views and 100+ comments. More important, Nicole Klug reached out to see if I'd be interested in organizing an event with her. Given my enthusiastic rant, I had to say "yes."

After some back and forth, we landed upon the following format:

• No pitching. We wanted people meet, not sell services to each other
• Intentional, pro-active networking. Everyone who attended would be engaged by Nicole, myself and a group of facilitators
• No speakers talking at people. Instead, there would be a series of 20-minute roundtable discussions (the topic was AI and marketing). Every 20 minutes, people would rotate to another table.

Here's how things went down:

• People really bought into the "intentional network" concept. They were enthusiastic, engaged and excited to network and connect.
• While there were different topics for each table and facilators, the discussions were allowed to go off in any direction. If there was an idea that excited people, that was great.
• While we wanted to have an equal number of people at each table, we quickly realized that a three-person discussion was as good as a 10-person discussion.
• We kept things simple. We considered gamification, quizzes and match-making but pulled back because we didn't want too many moving parts to kill any momentum.

Sometimes, you get lucky:

• Due to Toronto's terrible traffic, our name tags arrived late. Turning lemons into lemonade, we had people make their own business cards, which were creative, fun and conversation starters.
• It took a while to find a venue but Creeds Toronto stepped with an awesome venue in downtown Toronto.
• All the faciliators were awesome but one of them went above and beyond with a setup that includes playing cards, QR-linked videos and a Pi computer.

Key learnings:

• The format is great but I think the limit is 75 people. Anything larger and you risk it becomes less intimate.
• At the end of the event, wrap things up quickly. For anyone who wants to keep going, host an after-party. Ours happened at a pub around the corner.
• Give yourself enough time to properly promote. We went from idea to event in three weeks.

What do you think?

Amid the lasar-focus on sales and marketing, I'm rolling out a new services that combines marketing with sales enablement.

It's focused on B2B and SaaS companies with sales team that are struggling with low-quality leads, long sales cycles and losing deals to rivals.

To enhance their sales efforts, I will develop a strategy and then create sales assets such as case studies, testimonials, videos, content (blog posts, eBooks), and battle cards, as well as homepage refreshes and landing pages.

Any thoughts?

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If you're a B2B or SaaS company looking for help with marketing, most of my clients fall into the following buckets:

• They're doing little or no marketing. To date, they've been sales or product-driven. But they now want to drive brand awareness and demand generation and need strategic and tactical help to make it happen.
• They're doing marketing but it's not performing as expected. They need someone who can assess what's happening and work with internal or external marketers to make improvements.
• They want help to tackle specific projects (e.g. strategic plan, brand positioning, homepage refreshes, launching a podcast)

If you want to chat, reach out via email ([email protected]) or send me a DM.

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